Back in Mystic Falls, Jeremy has reverted to the grieving Jeremy of early season 1, who is sleeping with random girls and drinking and drugging his pain away, leaving Matt to be the only responsible one left.
Meanwhile, Caroline has checked out of her life at Whitmore and, in true Caroline fashion, has dedicated all her energy to find a way to end the magic-free-zone in Mystic Falls, while Tyler has been pulling a Caroline as well, throwing himself into school at Whitmore and exercising his werewolf-gene induced rage away as best he can. Not to mention the fact that with everyone around them spiraling or drowning in their own ways, he's immediately regained his role of being their desperately needed support system, which means he's not allowed to break down, or everyone else will break down right with him.
For all the ups and downs Stefan and Damon have had over the last 150+ plus years, Stefan could at least always depend on Damon being alive, and after everything they've been through, Stefan has grown accustomed to not being without him- now that Damon's gone (and for good, as far as they know), Stefan literally doesn't know how to live anymore, so he's just sticking to a routine and pretending like he doesn't care about finding a way to bring him back to prevent himself from getting his hopes up and then getting them crushed again.Īnd poor Alaric isn't exactly having a great time, either- he's moved on to binge drinking blood instead of booze and is overwhelmed by the enormity of everything that has happened since being resurrected, including, 1) finally having to adjust to being a real vampire who needs to drink blood, since he died before that became an issue the first time and 2) not getting to fully enjoy his newly-reinstated life because of the aforementioned vampire issues and because he knows his resurrection came at the cost of Damon and Bonnie's lives (along with the intense grief felt by himself and all his surviving friends and family that they're gone in the first place). Stefan has done the exact opposite of Elena by taking a page out of Dean Winchester's book and simply going through the motions of working a boring day job and having meaningless sex with some random girl named Ivy. Elena grieved for Bonnie and more or less dealt with it over the summer, (I imagine the fact that she's already grieved and mourned Bonnie's death early in season 5 before she became the Anchor probably helped) but she cannot for the life of her move on from Damon, so she finds scary- and for all we know, dangerous- ways of trying to hold onto his memory. It's interesting to see how everyone deals with the same losses in similar yet very different ways. Julie Plec said in an interview that the season-long arc would be everyone working their way back together again after losing Mystic Falls as their home base, and I have to say that I'm very intrigued as to how this will go down. It felt like a pilot in a way, or a reboot, (which is likely why Kath and I weren't huge fans, at least at first) but I'd be lying if I said that it didn't create a lot of potential. Watching all of our faves in the Mystic Falls Gang being split apart because of everything that happened at the last season was an interesting change of pace.
Then, I decided to rewatch the episode, which ended up actually changing my own mind about a lot of it. Still, I resolved to give it another couple of episodes, at least until we get a better idea of what Damon and Bonnie are up to, etc.
So, Kathleen and I watched TVD together this week, as per our Thursday tradition dating back to at least mid-season 4, and honestly, neither of us were super impressed.